The present invention relates to a peripheral illumination device, especially for a vehicle component, and to a vehicle equipped with such a peripheral illumination device.
The following discussion of related art is provided to assist the reader in understanding the advantages of the invention, and is not to be construed as an admission that this related art is prior art to this invention.
Peripheral illumination is used to date for objects such as speakers, pushbuttons, cup holders, etc. Normally, this kind of illumination involves a ring-shaped Plexiglas light guide having typically incorporated therein two LEDs. The light guide is hereby rigidly mounted in proximity of a structure that should be illuminated or accentuated, using clips. This allows a routing of a light guide about a surface area in the order of about 200 mm times 150 mm.
The vehicle interior encounters oftentimes temperatures between −40° C. and +80° C. Such severe temperature fluctuations cause installed structures and peripheral illuminations to expand differently. As the illuminations are rigidly mounted to the structures that are illuminated, temperature stress is encountered, causing destruction or defects of the interacting parts. This stress is also caused in light-conducting elements as a result of different thermal expansion of the assembled materials. Illuminations that wrap around large-area structures, for example a sunroof or large roof, require the illuminations to wrap around surface areas of about 1500 mm times 1000 mm. Thermal expansions encountered at such dimensions cannot be compensated in the absence of additional measures. Different building materials have varying thermal expansion coefficient, causing substantial differences in expansion when exposed to high or very low temperatures and ultimately leading to mechanical failure of the structural parts—e.g. rupture of a light guide—which in turn leads to malfunction of the structural parts or even to complete destruction. Thus, conventional models and methods are inadequate to provide peripheral illumination of large-area vehicle components.
It would therefore be desirable and advantageous to provide an improved peripheral illumination device for vehicle components to obviate prior art shortcomings and to enable also a wrap-around lighting of large objects.